


Exceptions

by mikkey_bones



Category: Skyfall (2012) - Fandom
Genre: Childhood, Family, Gen, Growing Up, Origins, Parents & Children
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-12-10
Updated: 2012-12-09
Packaged: 2017-11-20 18:19:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,764
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/588298
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mikkey_bones/pseuds/mikkey_bones
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Eve has no doubts that she can grow up and save the world, and people aren't used to that sort of invulnerability.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Exceptions

**Author's Note:**

> Maybe no one will read this, but I want to see more Moneypenny love in the fandom. She's such a fascinating character (in her _Skyfall_ Naomie Harris incarnation, specifically) and I wanted to explore that with her as the main character, rather than a foil for Bond or M or Q. Title and epigraph from the Lucile Clifton poem [won't you celebrate with me](http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/181377).

_won't you celebrate with me_

_what i have shaped into_

_a kind of life? i had no model._

The first time Eve holds a gun, she is twelve.  It's small -- a Glock, she thinks she remembers.  Her hand fits onto the grooved grip like a glove.  She touches the barrel.  She pulls the trigger.  It's not loaded, but if it was, the bullet would have gone straight into the vase on the table.

"Slow down, honeybunch," her daddy says.  "You have to look before you shoot."

He is a warm, large body behind her; his hand fits on top of hers like a glove as he moves the gun up, shows her the proper shooting stance.

"Even a small pistol has a kick," he says.  "Make sure you watch out for the kick."

She pretends to shoot the vase again, illustrating the kick by jerking up her wrists.  Her daddy laughs.

"That's more like it," he says.  His voice is low and easy.  This is her favorite memory of him, one where she doesn't see his weathered and tired face, just feels his warm body behind her, strength at her back.

A week later, someone knocks at the door.  Her daddy was killed in duty, the man-in-a-suit tells her.  His eyes show pity for her and her mother, who looks not horrified but surprised.  Eve screams and punches the man.  He blocks by grabbing her fists, holding them up.

"I know it's a shock," he says.  "My condolences."

Eve stands there and feels helpless in his grip until her mother takes her inside and shuts the door.

The night before the funeral she has her first dream about her daddy after his death.  She's holding his gun again, and there's his warmth behind her, his hands over hers, as he shows her where to aim.

But she's pointing the gun at him.

She forces herself to wake up before she finishes squeezing the trigger.

\---

Eve is not a pacifist.  She comes from a family of warriors.  She gets into a fight at school when her classmate Sammy calls the British military a bunch of Nazis; she comes home with a black eye but before that she broke his nose.

"Eve," her mother says, pressing a bag of ice to her face, "do you think your daddy would be proud?"

"Probably," Eve replies.  "You should have seen the way his nose was bleeding."

She never got to see her daddy fight but she gets to watch her mother as she begins her own quiet war.  The hospital a few blocks away becomes as familiar to her as a second home.

Cancer is a stupid word.

"How was school?" her mother asks from her hospital bed, hair and skin dark against the white pillows.

Eve is holding her hand.  "It was good," she says.  "We got our physics tests back.  I got a 98."  She mostly tells her mother about her grades because she doesn't have many friends.  She's too busy, now, and before, she liked fighting too much.

Her mother smiles.  "Good job," she says.

The two of them were never close before, because Eve always favored her daddy more.  Now, in the long afternoons at the hospital, Eve becomes familiar with a quiet strength and a fight that requires no gun, no army.

Just perseverance.

Her mother perseveres until the cancer goes into remission and she returns home.  Eve has a job now; she works part time as a waitress in a shop down the street.  She brings home takeaway that they share at night.

\---

Breast cancer strikes at the soft tissues above the heart.  Eve thinks this is an incredible irony, because she is in love with a dark-eyed Spanish boy and his flyaway hair, and the feeling eats away at her in her chest, the same place the cancer eats away at her mother.

His name is Rafael; her first kiss is with him after the end of year formal when she is seventeen.  She is wearing a shiny, copper-colored dress.  He wears a suit, and touches her beneath her chin, lifting her face to his.

"You are very beautiful," Rafael tells her with his lilting accent.

"Thanks," Eve says.  She reaches up and touches his hair.  "So are you."

Rafael laughs.  "Do you mean handsome?" he asks, raising an eyebrow.  He has dimples.

"No," Eve replies, and kisses him again.

She loses her virginity that summer in Rafael's bed.  It's not his first time.  Eve doesn't think she's doing it right, because it doesn't feel like much of anything but discomfort for her, but Rafael seems to like it.

It's mostly fumbling and annoyance.  She's been masturbating since age thirteen, anyway, so real sex is much less impressive than all the movies make it.

"When I go home I will tell all my friends about my beautiful African girl," Rafael says one night while they're in bed together.  He touches her curly hair reverently.

"I'm not African," Eve says.  "I'm English."

She falls out of love that summer too, and in August, when Rafael goes back to Spain, she doesn't keep in touch.

There are more boys in the world.  Eve learns that sex can feel good, at eighteen years old with Emmanuel from Nigeria.  He teases her until she screams; she rides him hard into the mattress.

Later, he suggests that she make dinner.

"I'm tired," Eve says.  "I worked today.  Let's just get takeaway."

Their relationship doesn't last long either.

\---

When Eve is in her second year of college, her mother gets sick again.  The cancer comes back like a ghost or the reincarnation of some terrible evil spirit.  It was biding its time; now it is stronger.

Eve is majoring in Film Studies and Spanish at the University of Southampton, but when her mother goes to the hospital again she drops her studies and returns home to London.  There are more important things than movies, anyway, as much as her choice disappoints her mother.

"I had to," Eve says simply.

Her mother, lying once more on the hospital bed, shakes her head, but Eve has always been a stubborn girl.

"Let me read you a story," she says.  Last time her mother was in the hospital, they read the _Harry Potter_ series together.  Now she's older and reading books by authors like Salman Rushdie and Chinua Achebe.

_Half of a Yellow Sun_ makes them both cry, mother and daughter, holding hands in a blank white hospital room.  It's one of Eve's last memories of her mother, who dies three weeks later.

Eve isn't there to hold her mother's hand at the last minute; she went to the hospital canteen to grab a sandwich and when she comes back the room is swarming with people.  This time, she doesn't punch the man who notifies her about her mother's death.

Instead, she nods numbly and stares at her mother's body.  She wants to cling to her and grieve, but there are too many people in the room and Eve cannot share such a private feeling.

So she claps her purse to her chest and signs the forms that must be signed.

The funeral, where Eve must reconnect with her distant grandparents and the cousins she never talks with, is one week later.

Afterwards, Eve stands for a while at her mother's grave.  She was buried next to her husband, Eve's daddy, in a cemetery for veterans and their wives.  Perhaps twenty centimeters of dirt separate Eve's parents now.

She decides to join the army.

\---

"Orphans make the best recruits," M tells her as she sits on the other side of the wide mahogany desk.  "MI6 is always on the lookout for promising young recruits who demonstrate a certain... spunk."

Eve gives a crooked grin.  "Too good for the army, am I?"

M raises an eyebrow.  "You are very different from your father."

"You knew my father?" Eve asks, all joking gone.  She leans forward.  "How did you know him?"  And who is this woman, who introduced herself with a letter, not a name or a rank?

"He was a great operative," M says.

"He was a captain in the army," Eve protests.  But she remembers that her daddy was always so vague about his work, especially when he came home bringing trinkets from all around the world.

M looks at her for a moment and Eve sees a sort of compassion in her eyes.  Then the woman opens one of her desk drawers and pulls out a thick dossier.  The folder is labeled **MONEYPENNY** in thick black letters.

"Moneypenny?" Eve asks, frowning.

"Your father's code name," M says, opening the file.  Eve sees her daddy's picture in black and white -- his dark eyes, sensitive mouth, close-cropped curly hair.  The picture is labeled _James Campbell, 1995_.

"This is just before he died," Eve said, reaching out and touching the glossy surface of the photograph.

M's lips are thin, her expression serious.  "He was a great operative," she repeats.  "One of my best.  It was a shame to lose him."

"He was a captain in the army," Eve repeated, and frowned at the file.  "He--"

"MI6 often recruits field agents from talented soldiers," M says.  "Like your father, or yourself.  We didn't want to see you wasted in Afghanistan, so we brought you here."

"Is that how he died, then?" Eve asks.  She feels a slow anger building in her chest and remembers how, when the man-in-a-suit came to tell them her daddy had died, she had hit him as hard as she could.

M nods, lowering her gaze.  "Killed in action," she says.

"Can I read the file?" Eve asks, touching her father's photograph again.  She wants to know everything about her father.  Most of all, she wants to know why he died.

There's a pause, while M looks at the dossier.  Then she says, "Yes."  Eve takes the file, greedy, and flips through it.  "You can't take it home with you," M says.  "It's government information.  But I'll give you a few minutes to read."

Eve looks up at her, leaving her hands resting on these documents that contain so much of her family.  "If I take the job," she says, "will I have more time to read?"

M frowns.  "I don't want you to sign up just to learn about your father," she says.  "Field agents work best when they have lasting motivation."

"I always knew he was saving the world," Eve says.  Her words are whimsical but her voice is firm.  "I want to do what he did."

**Author's Note:**

> This might be continued later.


End file.
